Miracle Baby: Surgeons Delivers Baby That Developed sideways Outside Mother's Womb, Unknown to her

 This piece was shared by a facebook user, Mrs lauretta Nwaka and it caught my attention at how miraculously a woman whose baby grew outside her womb, was delivered of the baby against the usual odds. Wow! A must read.

According to the site shared msf.org.uk, here was a 32-year-old lady who came to Agok hospital complaining of abdominal pain. Her pregnancy was estimated to be full term. The woman came from a town that is a few hours away, and she hadn’t seen a doctor during the pregnancy, which is not uncommon, especially if it was generally uneventful.


She had no major problems during this pregnancy, although she had previously had a miscarriage, and was now concerned about the pain.
She did not look generally well.

"That doesn't make any sense"

She was tender on the right side of her abdomen, with what seemed to be a hard mass under her ribs.
However the foetal heart beat seemed to be strong – a good sign. An ultrasound was done, and it showed that this 'mass' was the foetal head. The fetus was in ‘transverse lie’ – which means it was in a sideways position, lying across the woman’s abdomen.
Generally speaking, a baby cannot come out sideways. It has to be head or feet first. It’s a matter of simple physics.
The lady, being in pain and not generally well, had to deliver as soon as possible, and because of the position of the foetus, it had to be a C-section.

"I try to see the upper end of this 'mass' only to find what I think should be the gall bladder. Only, it's crying."

shadi abdelrahman

We start, as usual, with a transverse lower abdominal incision. We see the uterus, but to our surprise it seems to be a normal size, non-pregnant uterus.

“That doesn’t make any sense”, I thought.
I could feel the baby across the abdomen before we started. Above the uterus, there’s a mass that I didn’t, at first glance, recognise. But, this being the situation, we decide to extend our original incision upwards: now it’s T-shaped.
I try to see the upper end of this 'mass' only to find what I think should be the gall bladder. Only, it's crying.
Now it hits me. This is an abdominal pregnancy.

"She dodged a bullet"

This is a foetus that has developed entirely outside the uterus.
Needless to say I have never seen it before, nor has my more experienced colleague. I’ve read about it in books. Even then, there is never a photograph, it’s usually a drawing of what it might look like.
To put things into perspective, pregnancy outside the uterus, or ectopic pregnancy, accounts for one to two percent of all pregnancies. Most of the time, it’s in one of the fallopian tubes.
Only one percent of ectopic pregnancies grow in the abdominal cavity as abdominal pregnancies. And even a smaller proportion of those reach full-term. It is a very rare occasion.


When discovered earlier during pregnancy, it is usually terminated because it carries a great risk to the mother, and a high rate of foetal deformities. In our case, in a field hospital in this part of the world, there was no chance for this to be picked up earlier.
The crying gall bladder was the head of the baby. The mass above the uterus was the placenta.
We got the baby out, and we carefully removed as much of the placenta as possible without causing bleeding.
The baby was crying, which is always a nice sound to hear. The mother seemed to be doing well, too.

So far so good, mother and child are doing quite good amid fears of them contacting an infection.


God is awesome and these surgeons are just simply gifted.